The skinny little boy from Cleveland, Ohio, joins a revolution in baking

Call it a response to consumers' need — or is it knead? — for good bread.In home kitchens and backyard ovens around the country, small-scale bakers including longtime songwriter Alex Bevan of Stone Dragon Bakery in Madison and “Skinny Little Boy from Cleveland, Ohio” fame, “are fermenting a revolution — and the artisanal offerings go far beyond baguettes.”So says The Wall Street Journal in this story about what the paper terms “a subtle revolution in American bread.”“Around the country, in Phoenix and New Orleans, Tulsa and Portland, Asheville and Austin, and cities throughout Ohio, Connecticut and Utah, tiny bakeries are cropping up,” according to the story. “The bakers are self-taught: Most of them got started by reading books by master bakers like Peter Reinhart or Nancy Silverton, and gleaning tips online. They sell at farmers' markets, on local food websites or to nearby shops and restaurants. Many operate out of their residences, under new laws that allow them to sell food made in home kitchens.”The story ads that the microbakers “are encouraging the next step in American bread, too, by seeking out unique strains of grain and doing the milling themselves, using processes that allow oils in the grain to permeate the flour with flavor and aroma.”Mr. Bevan, a musician who has recorded more than 20 albums, and his wife, Deidre, bake French baguettes, country loaves and “our rock-star bread,” with garlic, Parmesan and chives, according to the story. Mr. Bevan built his own wood-burning oven in the backyard, but the couple also recently commissioned a mobile one that they plan to take to local wineries for on-site baking.There are four pictures of him at work. The images show him in various stages of the breadmaking process — weighing out loaves of baguette bread, scoring baguettes before placing them in his wood-burning oven to bake, and removing them from the oven when done.

The places you'll grow

Like numbers? Then you'll want to dig into the new Inc. 5000 list of the country's fastest-growing companies.There are more than 180 Ohio companies on the list, the highest-ranked of which is Vertex Body Sciences in Columbus. The food and beverage company ranked No. 19 with a sales gain of more than 10,000% in the past year to $11.8 million.

There are, of course, many Northeast Ohio companies on the list. Names you'd recognize include the Squire Sanders law firm, accounting services firm Skoda Minotti, IT services firm Park Place Technologies in Chagrin Falls, the Fathom advertising/marketing firm in Valley View, Proforma Signature Solutions in Brooklyn Heights, and Hyland Software in Westlake. Among the top 1,000 of the Inc. list, the Northeast Ohio companies are as follows:

No. 888 Bravo Wellness of Cleveland(Side note: The list is not easy to sort, so if I missed a top 1,000 Northeast Ohio company, please let me know and I'll add it.)

Looking up

Small business optimism has reached the highest level since the third quarter of 2008, according to a new survey conducted by Wells Fargo & Co. and the Gallup Organization.That's admittedly not all that high a bar, given the depth of the 2008 recession and the continuing tepidness of the recovery. But the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index nonetheless improved nine points since the second quarter and 36 points since the fourth quarter of 2012, to a positive 25. (Anything above 0 indicates economic expansion.)The firms said in their research that business owner optimism is driven by perceptions that credit has become easier to obtain.For instance, 28% of small business owners said they expect credit to be very or somewhat easy to obtain in the next 12 months, up from 24% in the second quarter of this year and the highest percentage since 2009. About 30% said they expect credit to be difficult to obtain in the next 12 months, down significantly from the 36% recorded last quarter and the lowest this measure has been in five years.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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